Trade Your Bible for Porn

Oh college kids. What wacky idealist ideas they have. Check out this article in MSNBC on kids from the University of Texas San Antonio who are giving porn to those who trade in their bibles (or other religious texts). The bulk of the article actually contains a partial transcript of an interview between Tucker Carlson and the group's president, Thomas Jackson. If only this could be as successful as "guns for cash" programs!

TUCKER CARLSON: Tell me why you're promising to give porn to people who bring in sacred texts, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran What's the idea?

THOMAS JACKSON: All right. Well, we have Bronze Aged tribal nonsense, these things written by people in tents ages ago, and we're using this to renounce science standards in our classrooms in America. We're using it to kind of influence our political agenda.

And we've read it. Atheists actually tend to be rather knowledgeable about scripture, and we are using this as a medium to get people to know what's actually within the religious text that they hold so dear.

CARLSON: Why porn, though? Why not just argue, you know, about what parts of the sacred text you find specious?

JACKSON: Well, first of all, you know, pornography gets a lot of negative press, and it's smut. A lot of it really is. And we wanted to make the comparison between that and the smut that is religious scripture or a lot of it, you know. The stuff that says a woman is worth half a man, the things that say, you know, you should beat children.

These things aren't acceptable in our society, and if pornography is not acceptable, then these things surely aren't. At the very least, what we're doing is trading something that's very, very bad for something that's only moderately bad.